Aussie Host Makes Statement On Sexism

Trending News: What Did Critics Say When A Talk Show Host Wore The Same Suit For A Year? Zilch.

Why Is This Important?

Because it’s an important wake-up call on how men and women are judged differently on TV.

Long Story Short

A popular Australian talk show host wore the same cheap Burberry knock-off blue suit for a year and didn’t get a single piece of criticism from fashion critics, while his female co-host gets slammed regularly for what she wears. The host, Karl Stefanofic, did the experiment to prove how men and women are judged differently based on what they wear.

Long Story

There’s nothing like a good custom tailor-made suit to attract a woman and to make a man feel great. But it doesn’t seem like fashion critics in Australia give a damn how good a man looks in a suit — they only care about what women are wearing.

Australian morning talk show host Karl Stefanovic sought to prove how unfairly women and men are judged on TV by wearing the same cheap Burberry knock-off blue suit for a year.

Days, weeks, months and a year passed and Stefanovic didn’t get a single Tweet, email, or snail mail letter from critics about it.

"No one has noticed; no one gives a sh**," Stefanovic told Fairfax Media as quoted in The Age. "But women, they wear the wrong color and they get pulled up. They say the wrong thing and there's thousands of tweets written about them.

"Women are judged much more harshly and keenly for what they do, what they say and what they wear."

Sure, this happened down under in Australia where everyone is probably nicer and a lot less critical than in countries like the US, but it does say something about how society looks at men and women differently in the public eye and frankly it’s not that surprising.

Stefanovic, host of Today, said he gets criticized for other things about his character, but never for what he is wearing. "I'm judged on my interviews, my appalling sense of humor – on how I do my job, basically. Whereas women are quite often judged on what they're wearing or how their hair is ... that's [what I wanted to test]."

The question of how media treats public figures like journalists and politicians is something that comes up again and again in the news. Just this week, Minority House Leader Nancy Pelosi slammed media for how they refer to her and likely future Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton fired shots at sexism in politics throughout her latest book.

Clearly, there is still room for improvement on how the media criticizes men and women differently as this Australian host has pointed out in a creative way. Let’s just hope — for his co-hosts sake — he gave the cheap suit the odd dry-cleaning before wearing it every day.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Does the media critique men and women differently based on what they wear?

Disrupt Your Feed: Where’s the appreciation for a great custom tailor-made suit?

Drop This Fact: According to a 2013 Media Matters For America survey, 62 percent of US newsroom journalists were men while 38 percent were female.